Looking Through and Into

I’ve been thinking about rain, probably because we’ve had so little of it here in Manitoba this spring. When everything should have been painted with newly-birthed green, it was still dry and dusty—toned down, muted, murky, so hard to define. There’s something about rain that changes the mood, then calls me out to take photos and to write.

Things can get dramatic, like thunderstorms that stir things up, even before the rain starts to fall. Dark clouds build and shift. Lightning splits the sky. Wind-whips hair.

Then the rain and the aftermath—puddles, branches on lawns, power outages, hail-dented cars.

But nature always makes up with us.

I also like a softer rain, the type of drops that barely make their marks in standing puddles. That settles into thousands of pinprick-size droplets on the hood of my rain coat. It’s the type of rain that tempts me to take photos through it, through the car window. Though you could argue that I shoot through the window because I don’t want to get wet or I’m feeling too lazy to actually get out of the car.

Writing, like rain, can be dramatic, steady, subtle, or a bunch of other things. Sometimes you want to rant, shock people, get all your feelings out. Or maybe you want to play with words, surprise readers. Or you might choose to be quiet and subtle, make them dig.

Whichever you choose, you need to look through and into things, maybe even rain drops on a window.

When in NZ, I remember thinking you have the mountains, oceans, etc. like in Canada but you can so easily drive from one to the other because you are a small country. I’m in Winnipeg in the centre of Canada and it is a very long drive to the mountains or oceans. But we have the beautiful huge Lake Winnipeg, almost as big as an ocean, haha! I grew up on its shores. Nice chatting with you.